Share some good stuff with you

1. Just watched a fantastic sermon by dear pastor Colin Dye - Standards: How should I live? Click to watch.


2. If you feel guilty about anything at all, I believe the article below from Purpose-Driven Life daily devotionals will minister to you, just as it ministered to me.


Thumbs Up
by John Fischer

This year I attended an Easter sunrise service on the beach near where I live. The pastor began her sermon with a story about a 12 year-old boy who lost his father in a horrible traffic accident. A week prior to the accident, the boy and his dad had been horsing around and the boy accidentally hurt his father’s thumb. Now, with his father dead, he couldn’t get over his guilt about that thumb. In a counseling session with his pastor, the deal about his dad’s thumb came up. His pastor, sensing the boy’s torment, got up out of his chair came around his desk and with tears in his eyes knelt down where he could look the boy in the eye and said, "If your father could be here in this room right now for just five minutes, what do you think he would say about this?”

The boy thought for a minute and said, “He would tell me to forget about it.”
Guilt has a good side. It is the thing that tells us we messed up. We feel guilty because we are guilty. But guilt has a bad side too — lots of bad sides, actually. We can hold on to it long after we’ve been forgiven. Why would anyone want to hold onto their guilt when they didn’t have to?
I can think of three reasons right now. It can be an excuse for inaction — a reason not to grow and accept responsibility for our mistakes and move on. We can incapacitate ourselves over our guilt and not have to do anything.

Or sometimes we think we can make ourselves feel better about our mistakes if we pay for them. In the case of this story, the boy was paying for his father’s death with his own guilt. In his mind, the accident was his fault. If he hadn’t hurt his dad’s thumb, none of this would have happened. We know there is no connection between these events, but a child doesn’t. The child is simply trying to do something with his pain by making it his fault.

Probably the worst reason we hold onto our guilt is because we don’t want to stop sinning. This is one of Satan’s most effective tools against us. He kicks us when we’re down. He knows if he can keep us feeling bad about ourselves, we’ll never get up; we’ll just stay in the sin-guilt-sin-guilt cycle and never get out.

Like the pastor coming from behind his desk, Jesus comes out of a tomb where He paid for our sins and says about our guilt, “Forget about it; I already took care of everything. Get up and keep moving. I’ve even given you my Spirit to confirm everything in your heart and help you walk in the power of my forgiveness.


3. Just thought you might wanna know, new photos that I took in the last month are uploaded on my multiply photo page! Enjoy!